


Bliss

by Littlebiscuits



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Drugs, Dubious Consent, M/M, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 19:05:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14677524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlebiscuits/pseuds/Littlebiscuits
Summary: Nothing in the Bliss is real, nothing that happens there matters.





	Bliss

It's a stupid accident, no one's chasing Rook this time, no one's looking for him

He's underwater, avoiding Eden's Gate sentries that are pacing slowly from one end of the bridge to the other. Only he underestimates how long the stretch of the water is. He spends too long swimming instead of breathing, comes out of the water too fast, dragging himself onto the shoreline, desperate for air and aching.

Straight into a field of sparkling, dizzying white.

...

Rook ends up in a boat again somehow, some indeterminate stretch of time later, on a river that probably exists, somewhere. At least Rook hopes it does. 

He expects Faith to make an appearance, to pop into existence behind him and grasp his hand, pull him into a madness of her own making. But this time Joseph is the one opposite him, bare-chested and serene, he has one arm half in the water, the swell and flow of it parting around his elbow. It's weirdly hypnotic, Rook forces himself to stop looking at it.

Though his partner is not the one who's rowing this time.

"You're a terrible boat-mate," Rook complains. "Burke rowed at least." 

Joseph just stares at him, eyes too dark behind his glasses. He looks real enough, solid enough, but Rook knows he isn't. The Bliss is good at making people who aren't real, and cutting out people who were. He thinks everything here is pulled out of your own head, too vulnerable to any word, or any suggestion, building something you believed in. Rook isn't falling for that again.

"How many times do we have to go through this?" Rook asks. He's honestly not sure whether he means the proselytizing or the smeared-out expanse of the Bliss.

"As many times as it takes." Joseph draws his arm out of the water, lets it drip against the bottom of the boat in long, sparkling streams. "Until you see, until you understand. I've only ever wanted you to understand, to make the right choices."

"Until I decide to join your religion of violence and madness, that preaches forgiveness, but likes to nail people to walls? You'll forgive me for my lack of enthusiasm."

"I'm trying to save people," Joseph tells him, leaning towards him, making the boat feel smaller than it is. "I'm trying to save as many people as I can."

"So am I," Rook says, and he'd thought he was past arguing with his hallucinations. "And neither of us is winning, we're just blowing everything up."

"Not everyone can be saved, not everyone wants to be saved, they fight so hard against it. Eventually there must be sacrifices."

Rook stops rowing, levers the oars sideways and drops them in the water.

"You know what, this is my hallucination, you don't get to preach at me, or make me row."

Joseph's answering sigh is heavy and frustrated, and that's honestly good enough for Rook. They're close enough to the edge of the river that it's really just a matter of waiting until they thud into the bank. Rook carefully levers himself upright, uses the warm curve of Joseph's shoulder to balance himself, familiarity be damned, while he climbs out of the boat. Heads deeper into the Bliss.

Joseph follows, Rook can hear the whisper of grass as he trails after him. Which seems funny, considering the grass isn't real.

"It's my hallucination," Rook says faintly. "And I'm tired of my every waking moment being a shove from here to there, expecting me to fix everything that breaks and expecting it to stay fixed. When that's just what people do, they break things. No one ever makes a difference in the end. No matter how angry you get, no matter whether you think you're God's chosen. We break things, it's what people do. Build a new world and someone will tear it down eventually, if you wait long enough." 

Rook stops, lets Joseph reach him. Joseph's frowning at him now, Rook can see him trying to find words, to find the right thing to say. 

"Do we stop trying then?" Joseph asks finally. "Do we let ourselves drown in it, and no longer try to rise above the corruption of the world?" 

Rook doesn't offer an answer to that, staring at the wavering grass, at the pinpricks of light that sparkle over it, because a thought has just occurred to him.

"This is my hallucination," Rook says again. "Why am I trying to win an argument with you?"

Joseph looks at him, exasperated but patient, as if they've already been through this more times than he can count. Joseph has an uncanny ability to make people feel like he knows them, like they matter to him. Which is funny, because most of the people in this county tend to just hand Rook a gun and point the way.

Rook reaches out, touches the warmth of Joseph's skin and pulls. Joseph doesn't even resist the movement, which Rook finds unreasonably amusing. It's like no one told him they were supposed to be enemies. And, honestly, Rook can think of a lot of reasons not to do what he's considering, but none of them are particularly compelling.

"You do have a habit of fucking up a man's day, you know that?"

Rook leans in and kisses him, before he changes his mind.

Joseph goes very still at that, crawling tension in every line of him. Rook thinks for a moment that he's going to resist, that this Bliss-warm version of Joseph is going to be as difficult as the real one. But then something in him settles. He lets Rook indulge his curiousity, lets the moment drag on. Until Rook tries to push his mouth open - Joseph pulls away then.

"Is this your sin then?" Joseph says, curiously soft. For the first time he's not looking at Rook. "That you would leave at my feet." 

Rook thinks Joseph is mostly talking to himself.

"I'd wager people have done worse to you." Rook pointedly doesn't look at any of the words on his skin.

Joseph looks at him, finally, but Rook has never been able to read much in his face.

"Are you testing me?" Joseph asks, quietly, as if he's afraid the answer might be yes. Which is a different question altogether, a different answer too.

Rook shakes his head, because he's not letting Joseph drag him into something complicated, not when he isn't even real. The Bliss is oddly freeing, with no Faith to tug and cajole him.

"I haven't had time to want anything," Rook tells him. "It's been pretty much explosions since I came here. Thank you for that by the way. And I'm hallucinating, so it's not real, who's going to tell anyone?"

Rook catches Joseph's hand, and pulls him deeper into the misty expanse of the Bliss.

"This place - not this place, not the Bliss damn it - Hope County used to be fucking beautiful, and now there's smoke on every horizon. It smells like charred meat and gasoline out there. Corpses on every street, and that's on you, no matter how you look at it."

Joseph is still eyeing their joined hands, like he has no idea how that happened. Rook should probably let go, but it feels strangely comfortable, it feels human. That's probably the Bliss talking, but he doesn't give a shit.

"Maybe you were right, maybe you weren't supposed to leave here. Maybe none of us were. But no matter what you think is coming, that doesn't give you the right to try and make the apocalypse happen, to set it all in motion and then watch everything crash down around you, you have to realise how insane that is?"

"I'm trying to save as many as I can," Joseph says again. As if he thinks that excuses some of the monstrous things he's done. "I was chosen, I did not choose. It was demanded of me. I have seen what you look like when you are driven by purpose. I have seen you burn through what I have built like a forest fire. Would you have done any less? Some things cannot be fought, though you seem intent on proving otherwise. The path that we must walk to reach salvation is not an easy one, but you do not have to walk it alone. I will be with you, I will not let you fall from it." 

This time Joseph is the one to tighten his grip, fingers curled over his own. 

When Rook had met Joseph Seed he'd been half naked and clearly mad. But every meeting since, every conversation they've had has told him something else. Rook's impression now, is that Joseph Seed is something half broken and vulnerable, shielded and armoured in religious conviction and a bright, focused insanity. Rook doesn't think he knows how to live any other way any more. Somewhere between serenity and raw, open wound. What do you say to a man like that? There's always an intensity to Joseph, a desperation to make other people see what he sees. When it's likely no one ever could. Rook thinks it must be fucking exhausting. 

"Do you even remember what it felt like to just be a man?" Rook asks. "To want like everyone else, to not question and judge everything and everyone. To not have the messy, human parts of yourself carved into your skin."

Joseph looks briefly angry, Rook can feel his fingers clench around his own. Neither of them have let go, Rook notices.

"I have never been anything other than a man. I have never refused to acknowledge my own weakness, my own sins. The choices I have made to build a place here, the _sacrifices_." 

"The blood you've shed," Rook reminds him.

"Yes," Joseph says firmly. "The blood I have shed, and though it pains me I would do it again. I would do it all again."

Rook believes him, the one thing Joseph does not lack is conviction.

"It must get lonely at the top of that mountain." The bite to that is intended, but Rook didn't mean it to be so sharp.

Joseph smiles then, it's not open but it's something.

"I have my family with me, I am not alone. Can you say the same, Deputy?" 

"You've made _followers_ of your family," Rook points out. Because he's met them, and every one of them is an explosion waiting to happen. He doesn't know if Joseph even sees that. "You're not in that circle, you're standing over it. People don't touch you like you're real any more. They touch you like you're going to save them. You have no one left to tell you when you're wrong."

"God has chosen me. He has set me on this path. How could I be wrong?" It's a quiet question, Rook thinks Joseph has asked it of himself more than once.

"Really, because I seem to remember God watching a lot of people be wrong over and over again, to see if they learned anything." That seemed to be a theme, or at least it had always seemed that way to Rook. 

Rook watches Joseph's expression slowly open into something a little less certain. 

He realises he's arguing with a hallucination again, something he told himself he wasn't going to do.

Rook pulls on Joseph's hand again, assuming that he'll follow. He honestly doesn't know where he's going. He doesn't think there's any escape from the Bliss, until you either shake it off or go mad. The grass is ankle deep and Rook stops walking because he realises one part of the Bliss looks like any other. He might as well give it up as a lost cause.

He flops down in the grass, stares at the glossy, sparkling unreality of the sky above them. Joseph seats himself beside him, with significantly more grace. 

Rook very slowly draws the sunglasses from Joseph's face, is briefly surprised when the other man doesn't resist. But if he'd had thought it would make Joseph's eyes any less unnerving then he's wrong. Rook folds the glasses and hooks them on his own shirt.

"I guess you're immune to the Bliss or something, huh? We must all seem like madmen to you." Rook laughs. "And isn't that a fucking hilarious irony."

Joseph makes an annoyed, sighing noise that Rook finds weirdly endearing. He turns sideways, finds Joseph's shoulder, and his jaw, and his mouth.

There's a moment of resistance, where Joseph is tense against Rook's curious pressure. His hand shifts on the grass, as if it wants to lift and push him away. But it doesn't, and eventually it curls shut.

"I shouldn't," Joseph says quietly. Though it's not a refusal, and this time he doesn't pull away after.

"No," Rook agrees. "I shouldn't either." He kisses him again, eases Joseph's mouth open and encounters only the barest resistance. Rook can't believe no one has ever thought about him like this. The ease with which he seems to pull people in, the half-naked intensity of him. The way he's always reaching out, even when he isn't.

"You are a distraction," Joseph says finally, shakily. It comes out like an accusation. Though it's a quiet one. "You have been as much since you came."

"Well then you've let me distract you," Rook points out. Which is true. Rook has been causing trouble like no one ever has.

Joseph acknowledges as much with his silence.

"How do I prepare for a man that cannot be stopped," Joseph asks eventually. "A man that resists my every gesture, that pulls down what I have spent so long building. I know that you are meant to be here. You are meant to be here, and yet He will not tell me why. Whether you are my destruction, my test, my child, my.... " Joseph lets the last choice die in his throat. "The truth has not been revealed to me yet," he finishes.

"I don't know either," Rook tells him. "But I do know that you can't beat the truth into people, no matter how hard you try."

Joseph stares at him for a long minute, and Rook still can't read the expression on his face, so he kisses him again. He thinks he's becoming attached to the drag and grate of Joseph's beard, the hard edges of his teeth. It feels scandalous and impossible, and it's all the more enticing because of it.

Rook sets his hand flat on Joseph's chest, then draws it down, until it touches where 'Lust' is carved, low on Joseph's stomach. The skin twitches and pulls in, but Joseph still doesn't move away.

"I kind of want to know what you did to deserve this," Rook admits. "And who carved it into you, this would have been near on impossible to do by yourself."

"John," Joseph answers, and Rook is aware that was only half of what he asked.

Joseph wears so much of his damage on his own skin, and Rook can't help but wonder if there's something protective in that. There's texture everywhere Rook puts his hands, warmth, the thump of blood underneath. Joseph is much easier to touch than Rook expected. Which is a thought that he never expected to be having. He bears him down into the grass, and Joseph lets him. He goes where Rook pushes like he doesn't know what else to do.

Rook leans in and opens his mouth on the word 'Eden' follows the tattoo down, until he finds 'Lust,' tongue tracing the faint raised lines of the letters. The world is getting away from him a little, hazy moments that go on too long. The Bliss makes everything feel like a good idea, makes everything warm and necessary. It's a little like being in love. 

Joseph's hand is in his hair, nails scratching every time his fingers curl shut.

"Lead me not into temptation," he murmurs quietly, which makes Rook laugh hotly against his skin, because he thinks it's too late for that.

Rook turns his fingers, to thumb open the button on Joseph's jeans, and suddenly Joseph's hand is wrapped round his wrist, tight enough to hurt. When Rook looks up he finds Joseph staring down at him, wearing an expression that looks so conflicted it's almost broken.

"You think the world is ending anyway," Rook says quietly. "You've admitted as much, that nothing's going to matter soon enough. So I can touch you, and tell you that you're wrong, and you can repent this moment of genuine human contact later, ask for forgiveness, carve yourself open. Whatever it is that fucking drives you. You can do it before the world ends."

Joseph frowns, fingers shifting on his wrist, and Rook honestly doesn't know which he'll choose. 

The hand slowly falls away, rests open and still at Joseph's side. It doesn't feel like surrender so much as agreement, a willingness to be led. The other is still in Rook's hair, moving only faintly.

Rook folds upwards again, finds Joseph's mouth and kisses him. Joseph's not expecting it, caught half-speaking, warm inside, and this time Joseph kisses him back. Rook's hands slide in Joseph's jeans again, he unzips him carefully, folds back down his body.

"Oh, underwear, I was wrong about that."

"You thought about this?" It's surprised, quietly accusing, which is funny considering Joseph is now the one gently encouraging the path his mouth follows, whether he realises it or not.

"Yes, is that what you want to hear. Yes, I thought about it, I confess, and we shall carve that into my skin later, no doubt, if you ever catch hold of me."

Joseph's hand slides down the back of his neck at the words, squeezes gently.

"Have I not already?" he says absently, it sounds confused, uncertain. 

Rook finds Joseph fully hard in his jeans, and he's not surprised by that at all. Joseph's inhale cracks in half when Rook touches him, when he draws him free and gets his mouth on him.

Joseph's fingers work deeper and then tighten in his hair. His thigh twitches under Rook's weight, a frantic desperation, a resistance. The moment doesn't feel like a hallucination to Rook, it feels utterly fucking real. Rook stops caring about madness, about purpose and choices, there's just the flushed weight in his mouth, the dig of hot fingers, and the desperate noises Joseph can't help but make.

After a long, distracted moment of indulgence, Rook pulls back, ignores the hiss of protest. He tugs Joseph's jeans and underwear down his thighs, pulls them all the way off, casts them aside. When he leans back down, Joseph's legs spread around him, suggestively easily. Rook wonders if Joseph would let him take liberties, if he'd let Rook pin him to the grass and push his thighs open wider. It's a heady, distracting, impossible thought. It makes a mess of all his intentions, turns them into simple wants.

Joseph's thigh presses into his ribcage, trying to get him closer, to get him back down against his body, an inch away from greed. Rook thinks it's fair to let him. Joseph is the one who kisses him first this time, who demands with fingers and teeth. For the first time Rook can feel Joseph's need.

"Take what you want," Joseph says against his mouth. "I won't stop you." 

It's unexpected, and it makes Rook's skin tighten, cock pulsing where it's crushed against the bare length of Joseph's thigh. Because he can't think of anything he wants more right now.

"And who will you get to carve this moment of weakness into your skin?" Rook asks quietly, eyes on the words carved and crossed out, some old, some much newer. None of them are delicate, all hard lines that he thinks started deep. 

Joseph's fingers are still on him, pulling so slowly that Rook's not sure if Joseph even realises it.

"Will you join me, if I say no one?" Joseph asks. "If I tell you I will not bleed for you, for this."

Rook shakes his head, can't find anything to say to that. Joseph makes a soft, considering noise, as if Rook has told him something by not speaking at all. He's low enough now that Joseph can reach his mouth. Joseph doesn't kiss him, though his eyes drift there, watch it open and breathe into him.

"Now, do you wish to talk about sin, or do you wish to bury yourself in me?"

Rook swears, body instinctively pressing in where he's folded between Joseph's legs.

"And I'm supposed to be the fucking distraction," he mutters to himself. 

Rook slides two fingers into his own mouth, other hand moving on the shifting warmth of Joseph's thigh.

"Move your leg up, just a little."

Joseph surprises him by doing as he's told. He makes a quiet noise of complaint when Rook's fingers press into him. Joseph doesn't seem to know what to do with his hands, they curl in the grass, press down, while Rook tries to convince his body to stop fighting him. He isn't entirely sure if that's possible. Rook has to question if the real Joseph has ever done this. If he's ever even wanted it.

There's a flush on Joseph's throat, and Rook wonders if this feels as indecent to him as it looks. Rook has to drop a hand and squeeze himself, and he watches Joseph's fingers dig in the grass at the movement. This isn't exactly how Rook likes to do this, but the hazy nowhere of the Bliss doesn't exactly provide for people. Even hallucinatory people who probably won't even fucking care.

Three fingers deep and Joseph's throat flexes, over and over, mouth open for every breath. This, Rook decides, this is what lust feels like.

"You had a purpose, did you not," Joseph says, thin and tight. That's impatience in his voice, and something uncomfortable and human. Rook wonders, for a moment, whether to call him on it.

"Like you're not a fucking temptation like this," Rook tells him.

Joseph glares at him like that's an insult, eyes dark, and for a second Rook is reminded of the raving madman that lives in the real world, all fire and fury and madness. Which should probably cut at his desire, but instead just makes it twist tighter and hotter. He spits in his hand, coats himself as best as he can, one shivery grasp and pull of sensation.

It's not going to be comfortable, it's not enough.

Rook draws his other hand free, sets himself, fingers hooked where Joseph's hip meets his leg.

Joseph's fingers dig painfully into Rook's arm. He's going slowly, he's going so slowly, but Joseph's breathing like it hurts. The Bliss is all jagged edges for a second, Rook can feel the dirt under his knees, the air on the back of his neck, the bite of Joseph's nails, but most of all he can feel the heat of Joseph's body, the way Rook's closer to being all the way inside him with every tiny movement.

And then he's deep, all the way deep, and it aches, and Rook has to stop to breathe through it. He braces himself over Joseph, listens to the rush of his own blood, watching the way Joseph's thighs and stomach flex, like he doesn't know what to do with the sensation.

Then Rook moves, he has to move, in slow, stilted pushes. Joseph frowns discomfort, curls a hand round Rook's arm - he doesn't make him stop but the fingers tighten, warningly. Rook isn't going to pretend that gesture, quiet and slightly threatening, doesn't make arousal tighten harder in his gut, but he's careful, as careful as he'd be if this moment of madness was real. If Joseph was real underneath him.

Eventually Joseph's hand relaxes, and Rook is moving, watching the strange shift of emotions across Joseph's face, a confusing mess of them, until his pleasure loses its sharp, conflicted edge and becomes something much more honest. Rook's own pleasure has become something tight and desperate.

"Fuck, _Joseph_."

Joseph's fingers flex again, squeeze. But this time it's not a warning.

Rook wraps his hands round Joseph's waist, changes the angle, goes impossibly deeper. Joseph's breathing is no longer pained, it's soft and shaken, Rook is going to have bruises on his skin, pressed deep by Joseph's fingers.

Joseph's other hand twitches at his side, an aborted need to touch himself. Rook wonders if that's a line he won't cross. He wonders if it helps. He takes pity on him, grasps the flushed, red length of his cock and works it. Joseph gasps and pushes back, one slow movement, his eyes are wide and dark. Rook thinks this is the closest he'll ever come to begging.

Rook doesn't want it to end, but everything does, everything always does. He shudders to stop and swears, and for a second everything is bright and sharp and so fucking intense. Joseph is breathing into his mouth, shaking out one moan after another, like Rook has _broken_ him. Rook's hand is still working on him slowly, lazily, until Joseph grasps his wet fingers and makes him stop. He's breathing fast and heavy, eyes mostly shut.

Rook pulls out, careful, careful, though Joseph still makes an unhappy, stilted noise, as if he might still stab Rook in the throat for the audacity.

Joseph's hair has come free, the flat tangle of it surprisingly human. Rook pulls a hand through it, just because he can, and it's warm and full of grass. He smiles amusement against the side of Joseph's face. He feels warm and dizzy, edges of Bliss, and the echoes of pleasure both prickling at his senses. He coaxes Joseph's head to turn, and his mouth is becoming far too easy to kiss. He thinks it's cheating, to have something that isn't quite real. But he also thinks he could get used to this.

Eventually Rook rolls onto his back, stares at the sky, the floaty misty-white stretch of it. He unhooks Joseph's sunglasses from his shirt, puts them on his own face. They're warm from his skin, and the yellow/orange hue makes everything look like it's glowing. Rook doesn't know if he could get used to that. To seeing the way Joseph sees. Maybe no one could?

"Are you satisfied, now that you've known the pleasures of my flesh," Joseph says, he sounds breathless still. 

Rook fights a smile at the phrasing. At Joseph trying to sound like a martyr, now Rook knows what he sounds like - what he feels like - when he comes.

"You don't have to sound so smug about it," Rook tells him. "And I don't know, are you?"

Joseph doesn't say anything, Rook had expected guilt after, maybe even accusation. He's seen Joseph's judgement up close. But instead there's a quietness to him, an acceptance, though of what Rook doesn't know. He supposes he doesn't actually know the real Joseph at all. Let his hallucination be enigmatic if it wants.

Joseph touches Rook's face, fingers soft on his forehead, before they very slowly draw the sunglasses free.

"I'm going to need these back," he says quietly.

There's a long, drawn-out moment of nothing, and then a warm flare of breath, and brief, hard pressure against Rook's mouth.

"God will not let you leave us," Joseph tells Rook quietly. Which might be a threat, or a promise.

Rook listens to Joseph re-dress, and then leave through the grass. To wherever hallucinations go. The Bliss is blurring at the edges.

He wonders where he's going to wake up.


End file.
